Air Buster

Air Buster came from the Japanese studio Kaneko, and the 1990 date on this entry belongs to the arcade version. The Sega Mega Drive release filed here is a later home conversion, which was the standard route for coin-op shooters of the period: the cabinet first, the cartridge a year or two afterwards.

It is a horizontal shooter, the genre that formed the backbone of arcade line-ups at the start of the nineties. The ship travels left to right, weapon upgrades drop along the way, and the real work is reading enemy formations and finding the one safe corner of the screen. The side view recorded in the data describes it exactly. Power-ups are handed out steadily rather than hidden, so the question is less whether you collect them and more whether you can hold on to them.

The entry notes support for more than one player, which changes the game considerably. Two-player co-op fills the screen with far more fire, but it also means two ships competing for the same escape routes. That mixture of help and hindrance is what made arcade shooters such good company games.

The Mega Drive was a sensible target for this kind of software. Its Motorola 68000 could push a large number of sprites, the palette was much richer than eight-bit consoles allowed, and the sound chip gave the music the sharp metallic edge that still identifies the machine instantly. The conversion also meant rebalancing the difficulty, because at home nobody pays for another attempt and there is time to drill individual sections.

OldGame.cz runs this one in the browser, so you can take the ship out over the metal scenery without installing anything.